7.21.2012

What A Rainy Rocky Run Taught Me About Redemption

Yesterday morning, as I try
to do two or three times each week, I headed out for a jog to the river and
back, with the intention of arriving at the Y just as it opened at 6, lifting
weights for about 20 minutes, and then jogging home. As I left the house, I noticed it was darker
than usual, but thought nothing more of it.
But within minutes, it started raining, and minutes after that it
started pouring.

By then, I was too far from
home to turn around and too wet to think of ending up at the Y afterwards. So I decided to lengthen my run, seeing that
I could go longer and still get home earlier than usual since I was skipping
the lifting. Instead of running to the
river, along the river trail, and back towards West Philadelphia, I went
further into Center City, ran north to the Parkway, and the northwest to the
Art Museum. Running the “Rocky” steps in
the pouring rain was highly satisfying.

It took me several rounds of
stuffing newspaper into my sneakers when I got home before they dried out, and
my wife gave me the stink-eye a bunch of times for various puddles of rainwater
throughout the house. But running in the
rain is invigorating.

And instructive as well. Earlier that morning I had read from the 4th
chapter of Paul’s 2nd letter to the church in Corinth. For many Christians, it is a well-known
passage, and I had particularly savored verse 17: “For momentary, light
affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all
comparison.”

Paul spends much of this
chapter, and much of his whole letter, on this theme of suffering having a
purpose. But this verse really cuts to
the quick. Not only can we bear present
suffering because of the promise of future glory, but somehow the present
suffering helps produce the future glory.

In other words, it is one
thing to tell yourself that while now sucks, it isn’t forever and one day
things will be awesome. It is an
entirely different thing to tell yourself that what sucks now is, in some
strange way, directly producing what will be awesome later.

If I see any positive
attitude towards suffering in myself and my fellow Christians, it is almost
always the former: “I will bear this current ordeal because it is temporary and
what awaits me is great and lasting.” I
very rarely see the latter: “This current ordeal is necessary because it produces what is great and lasting.”

In other words, many of us
treat hardship as undesirable – “I suppose I have to go through this, but if I
had my druthers I’d rather avoid it.” This
is an entirely wrong view of trials. The
great saints through the years knew better, and said things like “This is hard
. . . but this is God’s will for me. If
I somehow could make it go away, I wouldn’t, because that would be less than
whatever great thing God has for me through this.”

Which brings me back to my
rainy “Rocky Run.” Rain is not without
its downsides. It floods basements,
cancels picnics, and twice the big puddles it made almost caused me to sprain
my ankle. But it is temporary, and when
it is over, the whole place feels cooler and fresher. And, the good of rain isn’t just when it’s
over. Rain itself, of course, serves a
vital purpose, watering our gardens and replenishing our reservoirs.

There is, of course, a far
better and more relevant example of God blessing us not just in spite of
suffering but through the suffering itself.
In the redemption story, the suffering of Jesus is not an allegory
of temporary anguish followed by eternal glory.
The temporary anguish itself produced the eternal glory, for it was the
necessary exchange between the condemnation due us sinful men and the
exaltation due a sinless Son.

Paul’s words about “momentary,
light affliction producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all
comparison” are fulfilled in the extreme in the life, suffering, death, and
resurrection of Jesus. In a very real
sense, every affliction we encounter is, relatively speaking, momentary and
light compared to what Jesus endured.
And, in a very real sense, every affliction we encounter is an
opportunity to be connected to His momentary, light affliction, to be reminded
that as His affliction produced an eternal weight of glory, so will ours.

Whether it is a heavy
downpour or something far more painful, sapping, and dark, your affliction need
not be the end of your story. And it
need not be a purposeless thing worth only gutting through in order to get to
the other side. There is a way for it to
have a purpose, for it to produce something glorious. God did it with His own Son, and He can do it
with you, His child, as well.